2023/11/15 by Katharina T. Huber, Huber, Katharina T., Simone Linz +5
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Earth and Planetary Sciences · #05C05 #92D15 #Combinatorics (math.CO) #Evolution and Paleontology Studies #FOS: Biological sciences #FOS: Mathematics #Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies #Populations and Evolution (q-bio.PE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2311.09340
openalex publication_date 2023/11/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In evolutionary biology, phylogenetic trees are commonly inferred from a set of characters (partitions) of a collection of biological entities (e.g., species or individuals in a population). Such characters naturally arise from molecular sequences or morphological data. Interestingly, it has been known for some time that any binary phylogenetic tree can be (convexly) defined by a set of at most four characters, and that there are binary phylogenetic trees for which three characters are not enough. Thus, it is of interest to characterise those phylogenetic trees that are defined by a set of at most three characters. In this paper, we provide such a characterisation, in particular proving that a binary phylogenetic tree T is defined by a set of at most three characters precisely if T has no internal subtree isomorphic to a certain tree.